41–50 of 201 posts
Nothing really bad about a PIP. You get to coast for months while you do interviews prior to being fired. Never been PIP'd myself, but I would prefer it than being fired without warning.
Nothing really bad about a PIP. You get to coast for months while you do interviews prior to being fired. Never been PIP'd myself, but I would prefer it than being fired without warning.
I don’t understand why you would PIP a person and keep them waffling around for months on end collecting paychecks when you can just severance them out and pay less in time and money?
PIP = "Paid Interview Period"
I've never seen anyone recover from a PIP.
There is nothing to hate here. I have given numerous PIP's as a manager and only actually fired once. The purpose of a PIP is to improve, not to fire a person.
How on earth can you be a good manager and not realize that saying "your performance is shit, we're going to fire you unless you take this course and we deem you've passed" is totally and utterly soul destroying to a person?
I don’t understand why you would PIP a person and keep them waffling around for months on end collecting paychecks when you can just severance them out and pay less in time and money?
We do it because we legitimately want them to improve, and the last resort is "if we can't work it out by X, we can no longer employ you". I don't think we've done it more than once or twice, though, because increasing the directness of the feedback that the employee is not doing well has generally worked.
I got put on a PIP at Amazon, and even at the time I thought it was a reasonable criticism. I then worked hard, graduated out of the PIP, and stayed there a few more years. (I also opted-in to a second PIP (with my manager's knowledge and assistance) when I was leaving so I could get severance, but I don't really count that) One of my current mentees got put on a PIP a couple years ago, and she likewise has significa…
I too was put on a PIP early in my career, and worked my way out of it. It was fine. That said, I agree with the general sentiment that much more often than not the employer is not acting in good faith. Over the decades I've seen way too many colleagues get put on a PIP, I tell them to work hard because it can get better, and then they get let go anyways. Not sure what I'd do today if it happened to me. Probably a bi…
100% ghosted by my Director. Weekly 1:1s? He no-shows 2 of them. Near zero input. In "fairness", I knew what was happening, but had some tiny semblance of good faith. Hah.
Final meeting, he shows up with HR. "So we've been talking about (when?) and I have just completed my final review of the documents you created (bear in mind these have had significant input from multiple stakeholders who, not for nothing, generally approved), and I am still left believing that your output is not up to the quality or depth that we expect from our PMs, so..."
I pulled up the receipts, because why not? I think he may not even have known that GDocs provides good metrics on documents, including who has viewed, and when, and how many times. I did this with the HR person sitting awkwardly there. "You reviewed this document? GDocs says you've never accessed it. And this one? Never accessed. What about this deck? Never accessed."
At that point he turned his cam off and clumsily handed it over to the HR person. They asked if I'd like to follow up, but that the company would support the Director's decision. Fine, didn't expect any different. They did acknowledge that they could see too that he hadn't done anything to even present a token perspective that the PIP was anything other than firing with 30 days notice.
Lives and learns, we do.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do it because we legitimately want them to improve, and the last resort is "if we can't work it out by X, we can no longer employ you". I don't think we've done it more than once or twice, though, because increasing the directness of the feedback that the employee is not doing well has generally worked.
I've never seen anyone put on a PIP where the intention was anything other than eventual firing. In all these cases, the person was doing an awful job for over a year, or in some cases, since they were hired.
Employment is at-will. It's better to just fire without the PIP drama. As it is, a PIP does not provide legal cover if the employee writes back, effectively rejecting it.
Employment is at-will but you can’t fire someone for non-work reasons. The PIP is there to collect the data that they are firing someone for work reasons.
Note that the PIP alone does not suffice as valid supporting data if the employee contests it. It helps for there to be more data than it.